Our Capabilities

To enable our transformation, we strive to encourage adult smokers, who would otherwise continue to smoke, to switch to reduced-risk^*† Smokeless Products. Our focus continues to be on finding and developing new innovations and products and establishing databased insights that evolve our innovation strategy to create products that could reduce the burden on global public health.

We are dedicated to innovation through every thread of the company, and we believe that success and longevity will be achieved through a science-based transformation.

Over the last decade, we have embedded the innovation of Smokeless Products into our organisation. This ensures the correct behaviours, structures and practices are in place to enable innovation to thrive. Added to that has been the evolution of our technical capabilities to enable the development of consumer loved products and the increased capabilities to scientifically assess their impact on public health.

We are in our eighth decade of research and development having established R&D sites in the U.S. and UK in the 1950s. Back then, when BAT principally sold cigarettes, the focus was predominantly on the chemical and toxicological evaluation of cigarette smoke. With the advent of improved analytical techniques, novel spectroscopic methods enabled the accurate identification of individual compounds in cigarette smoke, even those present at very low (micro- or nanogram) levels.

Biology advanced with the creation of novel laboratory methodologies that could assess the toxicological impact of cigarette smoke while in parallel, biotechnology and specifically molecular biology techniques were applied to mapping the tobacco genome. The first clinical studies were conducted in the 1980s and 1990s to assess the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of novel tobacco products and with the advent of novel Heated Products, more sophisticated clinical studies were conducted to enable the measurement of Biomarkers of Exposure.

Today’s multi-disciplinary R&D builds on the strong legacy of those origins, conducting research using multiple core scientific disciplines, aligned to our scientific assessment framework (Figure 1).

This approach to our transformation has married recruiting new talent from other industries, with specific new skillsets, with a focused technical capability development programme for our longer-tenure scientists.